Beauty, Mercy, Justice

United Steel Workers, Mondragon Worker Cooperative Team Up

“It may not be the revolution’s dawn, but it’s certainly a glint in the darkness. On Monday, this country’s largest industrial labor union teamed up with the world’s largest worker-cooperative to present a plan that would put people to work in labor-driven enterprises that build worker power and communities, too.

Titled ‘ Sustainable Jobs, Sustainable Communities: The Union Co-op Model,’ the organizational proposal released at a press conference on March 26 in Pittsburgh, draws on the fifty-five year experience of the Basque-based Mondragon worker cooperatives. To quote the document:

‘In contrast to a Machiavellian economic system in which the ends justify any means, the union co-op model embraces the idea that both the ends and means are equally important, meaning that treating workers well and with dignity and sustaining communities are just as important as business growth and profitability.’

It might not sound like big news to members of their local food coop but it’s revolutionary stuff in the context of industrial production. The United Steelworkers represents some 1.2 million members; the average steel plant requires millions of dollars of investment, and there’s history here when it comes to worker ownership—some of it painful.”

It might have been a good idea if, instead of consolidating GM into the government to prop-up the three car company crony system we have if GM factories were allowed to be kept by the workers, especially in the brands that were extinguished such as Saturn and Pontiac.

That way there would be a benefit to being in a union in which the workers owned the factory or facility. (Perhaps then as smaller syndicates they wouldn’t become supporters of the enemies of the Church, as is presently the case with SEIU etc).